10Six (PC) review "Pretty much ANY other multiplayer game is better then 10-Six. Steer clear of this."

10-Six perhaps doomed itself from the start. It made claims to being the first ever one million player game, in theory. After beta testing and playing the finished product, it's hard to believe they could ever get one thousand people, nevermind one million, playing this maggot infested piece of swill.

The basic plot of 10-Six could have been made up by a six year old. You're a settler on a planet with a name of, get this, Visitor. Pure creative genius. You're a representative of one of four also cleverly named corporations, Infrastructure, Toyco, Brute Force, and Toyco. You MUST join one of these four companies, no free-lancing allowed.

Each settler gets their own little piece of land, which they're free to mine for transium. Transium is an ore that is used to power all your facilities, extracted from the ground by mines. You can also exchange it for visitor dollars, which are used to buy jitters.

Jitters are very small green things that look like alien parasites. However, they expand to create structures, such as armories and transium wells. Unfortunately, there's no way to pick one individually, since they come in random packs of ten. You just have to keep buying packs and hope you get what you want.

Your goal is to take over enemy bases while still protecting your own. This is achieved by using two main options - rovers and Mutal Defense Networks (MDN). Rovers are robots that will patrol wherever you tell them to. They're ideal for either attacking or defense.

A Mutual Defense Network is a bit different. Basically, it's a group of other players that you belong to that will help you if you're under attack, or if you're launching an attack. They're pretty much essential for survival; taking on the entire world of 10-Six by yourself is impossible. However, you have to find one all by yourself though.

In theory, these ideas sound great. They're executed with the precision of King Kong though. The interface for 10-Six is confusing, and has a steep steep STEEP learning curve. Expect to spend a lot of time with the in-game help and the instruction manual.

There's almost no pace and excitement to the game. When exciting moments DO come along (an attack on your base or a hated enemy's base) 10-Six often shoots itself in the foot with the goofy controls and clunky response time. It strives to be DOOM combined with Warcraft and fails horribly at both.

Perhaps what is most disappointing about 10-Six is that none of the developers took any of the beta testing advice. Beta testing went on for almost two years through HEAT.NET, and all of these issues were in the ORIGINAL release of the game. Very few bugs were ever fixed, and it's puzzling as to why it took them two extra years to release a game that they didn't change.

Graphically, 10-Six is not impressive by any extent of the imagination. Watching buildings go up is a little fun, but all they do is simply rise out of the ground. Graphics were kept to a minimum to keep ping times reasonably low. Sound and effects are pretty much non-existent.

For a multiplayer game, the interaction in 10-Six is pathetically low. There's no chat lobbies to populate while you're playing the game. Except for people in your MDN, you probably won't talk to many people, excluding attackers. This is a critical flaw for a multiplayer game.

Pretty much ANY other multiplayer game is better then 10-Six. Steer clear of this and play much better games such as Everquest, Well of Souls, and Asheron's Call.

Community review by sgreenwell (Date unavailable) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.